New Welsh Short Stories

by Author: QuarkXPress

  He turns to look at me.

  Look, that God up there. He is speaking to me, electronically. He don’t like the grey.

  I grabs my face in my hand. It’s all I can do to calm down.

  Whatever, Kung Fu, I goes. Just give me my phone and my smokes. I got to see my daughter.

  He puts his arms by his sides. I know what’s going through his mind. Tasha don’t mean fuck all to him. There’s something grey here and God told him to get rid of it. That’s all that matters.

  Before I can think of anything else to say, I gets the feeling that I should have been paying more attention in other places. There’s a siren going off, and it’s getting closer. Someone must have heard Kung Fu having an epi with the lamppost. They must have called the cops.

  The police car pulls up across the other side of the road. My vital organs drop somewhere into my pelvis. I still ain’t seen Tasha. If they recognises me, then I might not see her. And I was gonna hand myself in. I wasn’t gonna run away to Cyprus like the other boys. Maybe my ex will bring Tasha for a visit if I gets a local enough prison.

  I’m thinking it’s all over when Kung Fu grabs my shoulder. He got that long clinching stare going on and I has to concentrate on the deep blue of his eyes.

  Your name is Jo Collins, he goes. Your name is Jo Collins and you are my carer. You’re takin me back to the hostel.

  I don’t even get a chance to ask what he’s on about. The coppers gets out of their car but they leaves the lights on. The younger one is about my age. He keeps his right hand back and on the truncheon attached to his waist. He thinks you doesn’t notice this. The older one stays by the car and crosses his arms.

  You can tell that they knows who Kung Fu is cos they speaks to me first.

  Alright there, mate, the younger one says. Everything OK, I hope.

  They always starts like this. That’s the thing with the law. You’ll never meet anyone as polite as a copper who don’t want you to know that he’s two minutes away from arresting you.

  I can feel my heart trying to escape from my ribcage. I ain’t ever seen these two before. But if they works out who I am then they’ll have me on lockdown before the end of my next breath.

  Something comes back to me. Kung Fu got the answer. My name is Jo Collins. Jo can be a bloke’s name too.

  It’s all good, Officer, I goes. My name is Jo Collins and I work for Taff Housing Association. We were just on our way back to the hostel. He wandered out through the back door when I was on my tea break. No problems at all.

  Kung Fu is one of those people who everyone knows. There’s at least one Kung Fu in every town. There’s a few in each quarter of every city. Be careful. If you can’t work out who the Kung Fu is round your way, it might be you.

  Let’s see some ID, the copper goes.

  I pats myself down so I got time to think.

  I just run straight out of the hostel, Officer. I must have left it on the desk.

  They radios through to find out if a Jo Collins actually exists. I ain’t got much time.

  Come on, Officer, I tries again. You knows Kung Fu. Everyone knows what he’s like. Let me take him back to the hostel. There ain’t no damage done. People just gets paranoid. We doesn’t need all this bother. You can come and check on him later if you like. I’ll give you the address.

  He looks at the older copper. There ain’t no way of knowing how they communicates but after a few seconds he’s shooing us away with one hand.

  We gets in my car, does the world’s worst eight-point turn as the coppers cross their arms and watch, and splutters back towards Pentrebane. I can feel how I needs to wipe the sweat off my forehead.

  I ask Kung Fu for my phone and smokes. He puts them in the glove compartment.

  You ain’t really Jo Collins, he goes.

  Yes, Kung Fu. I knows that. I’m your spar Tommo, remember. We’ll go find Jo Collins now.

  Kung Fu walks away. He don’t even wave. He passes a lamppost but he don’t even attack it, cos he’s gonna see Jo Collins in a second. I starts the engine as he knocks on a window, and I goes to say goodbye.

  MR PHILIP

  Carys Davies

  You could say it began with the pause in my heart, with me standing on the other side of the door with my palm on the fingerplate, listening.

  But it would be truer, I think, to say it started when I asked my father, one bright and not too cold Saturday in May, what he’d like to do that afternoon, running through with him the various possibilities: a short walk across Norman Park to the shops on Chatterton Road, a ride into Bromley High Street on the bus, or perhaps just put on our coats and bring out the folding chairs from the garage and sit on the patio in the sunshine and talk? Truer to say that it started when to each of these suggestions he shook his head and said what he’d really like to do was to drive to Moravia, to the shoe museum in Zlín. His cleaning lady had told him about it. They had Smetana’s slippers there, he said, and a pair of riding boots that had belonged to King Wenceslas.

  He’d always been interested in shoes and very fastidious about his own – for as long as I could remember his London shoes had been for going up to London; his Bromley High Street shoes for going to Bromley High Street; his Chatterton Road shoes for crossing Norman Park to the shops on Chatterton Road; his Upstairs shoes for upstairs; his Downstairs shoes for downstairs.

  By the time he asked me to take him to Moravia, he’d had to give up his London shoes because he couldn’t see well enough any more to take the train by himself up to Victoria. It was a while too since he’d worn his Bromley High Street shoes – these days he only ever went into Bromley when I came down to see him on a Saturday, and even then it was unusual for him to want to venture that far.

  ‘Zlín?’ I said and he nodded.

  ‘What shoes would you wear?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. I haven’t decided.’

  I called the paper and begged a week off work and we left the following morning. Three days later we were in Bohemia driving through dark forests and smooth-shouldered hills, Dad tucked up beneath a blanket in the passenger seat, Chatterton Road shoes on his neat size 8 feet – not as smart as his Bromley High Street shoes but more comfortable and deemed the best ones in the absence of any special Europe or Holiday or Former Eastern Bloc pair. He was very keen on Smetana and had brought along his CD of The Bartered Bride, which we played full-blast because even with both hearing aids in he was pretty deaf at this point as well as half-blind. During a warm spell between Cheb and Karlovy Vary he conducted with his left arm out of the open window. He looked very happy. If he was worrying about my love life, he didn’t mention it. He didn’t once try and bring up the subject. He had his enormous perspex magnifying glass with him – he was looking forward, he said, to seeing the composer’s elastic-sided slippers.

  It was the guidebook that said the slippers were ‘elastic-sided’, and as we drove Dad and I wondered about this. ‘Did they even have elastic in those days, do you think?’ I said, and he shrugged and said he didn’t know – perhaps they had something that wasn’t quite elastic as we knew it but like elastic, made of something else but performing the same function? It would be interesting to find out when we finally saw them.

  The guidebook was full of other information about Zlín, and when we paused along the way I read Dad snippets from it. There was a big section titled SHOE MANUFACTURING IN ZLÍN. Here we discovered that as well as the shoe museum there was a large shoe factory and shop in the town that we could also visit. Under the Communists, it said, shoe consumption in the former Czechoslovakia had been the highest in the world – an average of 4.2 pairs per person per year – all because of Zlín.

  ‘That’s almost as many as you Dad!’ I said and he flapped his hand in a broad, modest gesture, as if batting away an undeserved compliment.

  Another section was headed FAMOUS PEOPLE BORN IN ZLÍN.

  ‘OK Dad,’ I said, ‘which two famous people were born in Zlín?’

  He sat thin
king for a long time before he said, ‘Give me a clue,’ and I said that we’d seen a play by this person when it opened quite a few years ago at the National Theatre. Again he sat thinking for a long time and then said, ‘Give up,’ and I said, ‘Tom Stoppard. Who do you think the other one is?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Shall I give you a clue?’

  ‘No – just tell me.’

  He was sounding a little testy now – he hated losing any kind of game.

  ‘Ivana Trump,’ I said.

  ‘Never heard of her in my life.’

  He was amused though, and interested, when I told him I’d once written a short freelance piece for the Evening Standard about Ivana Trump’s ambitions to set up an interior design business in New York. All I could remember now was something about a leather-covered wall she’d installed in someone’s dining room with a waterfall running down it.

  ‘Perhaps it had something to do with growing up in a shown that made toes?’ suggested Dad.

  Just outside the town itself we stopped for lunch and Dad tried out both names on the waiter and thought it was very funny when only Ivana Trump’s produced an enthusiastic nodding, Stoppard’s a look of blank unconcern, a shake of the head.

  He was terribly disappointed though, when we got into Zlín – we both were – because the shoe museum was closed for renovation, its collection of shoes, including the famous royal riding boots and the elasticated slippers, packed away in storage and impossible to see. We were disappointed, too, about not seeing the Communist-era shoes. Our guidebook spoke of them as if we would never see anything quite so frightening, anywhere, ever again, and now we could only speculate about what they might have looked like. We stood for a while outside the locked doors and then returned to the car to see what else Zlín might have to offer. ‘There’s the factory,’ I said, feeling quite hopeful, ‘and the shop,’ but it was raining now and very cold. A quiet gloom had spread from the deserted museum and Dad seemed to have lost heart in the whole expedition. He was tired, he said; perhaps we should just go home.

  A couple of weeks later I found him one Saturday morning in Norman Park wearing the wrong pair of shoes.

  I’d arrived at his house as usual, and finding him gone I set off in the direction of Chatterton Road, tracking him down eventually by the flower beds in the park, and the first thing I saw, even before the new look of fear and bewilderment in his pale blue eyes, was that he was wearing his Downstairs shoes, and he never, ever, wore his Downstairs shoes anywhere except downstairs, not even upstairs.

  Within days he was in hospital where they located a large malignant tumour on his brain which, almost overnight, had begun producing dementia-like symptoms before moving with catastrophic swiftness into a kind of electric storm where for a week he lay on his bed in the ward spouting gibberish and worse. ‘They lose their inhibitions,’ one of the nurses confided to me in a loud whisper next to his bed, as if I hadn’t noticed. Later, a different nurse, when she saw me in tears, brought me a cup of hot tea and said that sometimes, even with such a large tumour, the doctors could relieve a bit of pressure on the brain and they came back to themselves, at least for a little while.

  And he had.

  For a whole week he was practically himself again, frail and very deaf and half-blind as he’d been for the last few years, and still mangling some of his words – the day after his operation he asked me if I could get him a drop of semi-skilled milk for his tea. He was confused about which year it was, or which decade, but in spite of that he was himself. He knew who I was and what the two of us were to each other. He talked to me about music and books and then on that very last day when he was still waking up on and off for a few minutes at a time, he became suddenly gripped by anxiety about leaving me, as he put it, ‘by myself’ and grew obsessively solicitous about my love life. It was the one thing that seemed to weigh upon his mind and he kept returning to it. He asked after a girl I’d brought home with me for a few days during the Christmas holidays when I was a student, whose name he couldn’t remember. ‘The Scottish one with the red handbag,’ he said. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I don’t know, Dad. We lost touch. It’s a long time ago now.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t see her any more?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where’s Helen?’

  ‘Helen’s in America, Dad. We’re divorced, remember? She married Dave Crater? The mathematician from King’s? You used to call him Crave Data.’ (Long before he started involuntarily mixing up his words Dad had been fond of a good spoonerism.)

  ‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘Yes.’ He sounded sad. Had I met anyone new recently, anyone nice?

  ‘I meet plenty of new people Dad. All the time. Just no one I really like.’

  This wasn’t quite true.

  I hardly seemed to meet anyone new any more and when I did things never seemed to go anywhere. If Dad had been a bit more robust, if he hadn’t worked himself up into quite such an anxious state, I might have told him now about my various failures; I might have pointed out that if you like someone, it helps if they like you back, and that hadn’t happened in a while. Nothing since Helen had ever got off the ground – things always seemed to start fairly well and then for some reason I could never really put my finger on they fizzled out almost immediately. Perhaps I tried too hard, perhaps I came across as a bit desperate, and that put them off, or perhaps I just bored them. Obviously I’d been more boring than Crave Data and that had been deeply depressing and disturbing. Sitting with Dad now, I found myself wanting, for once, to talk to him about it, to confide in him and tell him how things really were. He was looking at me earnestly with his pale blue eyes, his fingers fidgeting with the edge of his blanket. ‘There’ve been one or two,’ was all I said, but nothing that had worked out so far. ‘Maybe not everyone thinks I’m as great as you do, Dad!’ I added jokily.

  ‘What about Ruth?’ he said.

  ‘Ruth?’

  He nodded and I searched my memory for possible Ruths. ‘Ruth Lind?’

  Another nod. I didn’t know what to say – Ruth Lind had been our neighbour in Newport, before we moved from Wales to England, when I was eleven. Back then she’d been a retired schoolteacher.

  ‘I think Ruth might be a bit old for me Dad.’

  ‘Oh.’ He looked crestfallen. ‘Really? She seems young to me.’

  For a while he was silent. Agitated though, fretful.He repeated what he’d said about not wanting to leave me by myself – that he wished he knew I was with someone. He said he didn’t want to have to worry about me, which was an odd thing for him to suggest – that he’d worry about me when he was dead. He wasn’t in the least bit religious and had never expressed any belief in the hereafter and I guessed that what he meant to say was that he was worried about me now, here in this world, before he left it. I let it go.

  He tried to dredge up the name of another of my old girlfriends from the 1980s and suggested a couple more times that I might hook up with our Welsh neighbour Ruth Lind who by this time, I calculated, would be about a hundred and five.

  I took his hand and gave it a squeeze and told him not to worry. ‘I’ll be fine Dad. Honestly.’

  He closed his eyes. The veined lids fluttered. The conversation had exhausted him. His head, on the pillow, looked heavy, a burden. He spoke my name, once, Philip. He fell asleep and later that evening, he died.

  I wasn’t fine.

  I missed him dreadfully.

  After his funeral I went back to work but I would sit at my desk unable to speak or do anything for hours at a time; when Saturday came round, I went down to his house.

  Saturday had always been my day with him and it seemed impossible to stop doing the same thing now, even though he wasn’t there any more – for as long as I could remember I’d taken the tube early on a Saturday morning from my flat in Shepherd’s Bush to Victoria, and then the train down from Victoria and walked the last half mile from the st
ation to his house; in the evenings I’d catch a late train back to town. I did the same thing now, except that instead of being with Dad all day, I spent the hours walking in the garden or sitting outside on the patio in one of his folding chairs, moping around the house, looking at stuff – his old Boy Scout diaries from the 1930s, his violin, his letters home to his parents and brother from Palestine after the war when he was a young soldier stationed out there, photographs (I found one of me with Ruth Lind taken in our back garden in Newport – me looking small and spotty, her looking tall and remarkably elegant in a tweed skirt and cardigan). At some point during the day I’d walk over to Chatterton Road to the shops to buy something to eat for lunch, then I’d come back. Sometimes I’d re-read his Boy Scout diaries, his letters from Palestine. I told myself that soon I would start sorting everything into piles. Keep. Chuck. Charity Shop. House Clearance. But more often than not I’d go instead to the coat cupboard under the stairs and open the trapezoid door and stand there looking at all his different shoes lined up next to each other in their neat pairs: his stiff black London shoes, worn in the days when his eyesight was still good enough for him to come up to London on the train to see me and go to a concert or a museum; his smart brown Bromley High Street shoes; his Chatterton Road shoes, which were a retired pair of London shoes; his Downstairs shoes, which were a retired pair of Bromley High Street shoes; his hideously ugly Upstairs shoes which were a kind of geriatric sneaker from Clarks called a Wayfarer – tan-coloured nubuck with grey nylon webbing on each side, a wide stitched toe like a child’s mitten. I’d look down at my own feet, enormous in their all-purpose size 11 loafers (my seven-league boots he called them) and feel so far away from him, so separate and sad, that I’d sit down inside the shoe cupboard and close the door and cry.

  Both inside and outside the shoe cupboard I thought a lot about the different stages of his decline: the brief reprieve near the end after his operation – the relative lucidity in the days before he died; the sudden onslaught of craziness before that, and how until the morning I found him in Norman Park wearing the wrong shoes, he’d never really been noticeably unwell; there’d been no signs that anything was amiss other than the slips in his speech, nothing beyond the hearing aids he’d had for a long time in both ears and the large thick-lensed magnifying glass the size of a ping-pong bat he used to help him read his post, his bank statements, the cooking instructions on packets of food and anything else he needed to be able to see properly. It was ages since he’d given up reading books and the newspaper. In his last years his great pleasures were music, and the cover-to-cover recordings of novels he brought home from the library, the volume knob on the sitting room hi-fi or the small CD player next to his bed turned up to maximum. For years I’d been addressing him in a kind of constant mid-level shout that seemed very loud to me but which he seemed to find very acceptable; when his cleaning lady came on Thursdays, he’d had to start leaving a key under the plant pot next to the front door because even with his hearing aids he could no longer hear her knock or ring him on his phone.